It was a bitterly cold winter morning on January 5, 2000 in St. Clair County, Illinois. At just 4:00 in the morning it was black as pitch and more than three hours before sunrise, and the streets were correspondingly deserted. Today we’re going to study what is said to have happened over the next 45 minutes or so, involving at least four police officers from different different towns, speeding down the highways, chattering on their radios, and pursuing what would become considered by some to be one of the most elusive UFOs in history. It’s become known as the St. Clair Triangle case, and it’s had UFOlogists scratching their heads ever since.

In all, seven people saw the object, including four police officers; due to the wee hours, not many people other than police officers were up and about. The first was 66-year-old Mel Noll who parked at his miniature golf course around 4 in the morning, to make sure his plumbing hadn’t frozen. He saw what he described as a big house floating in the air, with windows and all sorts of details. He went to the nearby police station in Highland, where the dispatcher radioed officer Ed Barton. He saw a bright white light, followed it, then parked and got close enough to shut off his own lights and observed that it looked like a giant triangle with bright white lights at each corner. Nearby, insomniac Johnny Doss, listening to a police scanner, heard the call and also went outside and saw what he later described as having several bright lights.

Next, officer Dave Martin in a neighboring department spotted it, and described three bright white lights with a blinking red one in the middle. Nearby, officer Craig Stevens also heard the chatter and parked his car in a big dark field where he hoped he might be able to see something, and described a huge object with three bright lights in back and a red one in the middle. Further south, officer Matt Jany got out his binoculars and saw what he thought he heard the others describing. It was big, taller in the middle, with lots of lights on it; white on the extremities and red in the middle. The final sighting was two hours later, near sunrise, when commuter Steven Wonnacott saw what he described as a motionless arrowhead shaped object, with a few bright lights and lots of smaller lights on it. Overall, the object spent about one hour traveling some 100 km in a generally southwestern direction.

The UFO community wasted no time. Among the first on the scene was . . .